Get year, month or day from numpy datetime64

Question

I have an array of datetime64 type:

dates = np.datetime64([\'2010-10-17\', \'2011-05-13\', \"2012-01-15\"])

Is there a better way than loop

Answer 1

As datetime is not stable in numpy I would use pandas for this:

In [52]: import pandas as pd

In [53]: dates = pd.DatetimeIndex(['2010-10-17', '2011-05-13', "2012-01-15"])

In [54]: dates.year
Out[54]: array([2010, 2011, 2012], dtype=int32)

Pandas uses numpy datetime internally, but seems to avoid the shortages, that numpy has up to now.